Six In The Morning Thursday February 16

Trump: Two-state solution not only way to achieve peace

In a major policy shift, US president says he would back a single-state solution, after meeting Israeli PM Netanyahu.

President Donald Trump has dropped Washington's commitment to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, backing away from a long-held position of the US and the international community in the Middle East.

In a joint press conference on Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said he would back a single-state solution if the two sides agreed to it.

"Looking at two-state or one-state, I like the one that both parties like. I'm very happy with the one both parties like. I can live with either one," Trump told reporters after meeting Netanyahu in Washington.

Trump’s dangerous delusions about Islam

The president and his advisers paint Muslims as enemies of modernity. The neglected history of an age of Middle Eastern liberalism proves them wrong
by Christopher de Bellaigue

Thursday 16 February 2017 06.00 GMT

In the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001, amid the grief and rage that followed the toppling of the World Trade Center, President George W Bush did not declare war on Islam. “These acts of violence against innocents,” he told Americans in the week after 3,000 people were killed by Muslim terrorists, “violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith.” The war that Bush went on to declare soon thereafter was not against a religion, but against “terror” – and within that baggy term, he focused on al-Qaida, “a fringe movement”, in Bush’s words, “that perverts the peaceful teaching of Islam”.


Bush’s tact may have been caused by a short-term desire to rein in attacks on American Muslims (and others mistaken for them, such as Sikhs) in the wake of 9/11. But it also served the longer view of the president and his advisers, who believed that the Muslim world, much like everywhere else, was capable of being improved by exposure to democracy, free market capitalism and individual freedoms. In this regard, Bush’s views were in line with the then-influential “end of history” thesis proposed by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama in 1989. With the end of the cold war, Fukuyama argued, it was only a matter of time before western liberal democracy was recognised everywhere as the best form of government. By the turn of the century, the belief that we were witnessing “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to western liberalism” was never more widely shared, and it lay behind one of Bush’s professed goals in invading Afghanistan and Iraq: to shepherd the Muslim world towards the universal ideology of liberalism.

Kim Jong-nam pleaded with North Korean leader to spare his life before his 'assassination'

Letter from Kim Jong-nam pleading for his life emerges as second female suspected arrested in connection with his death at Kuala Lumpur airport

• May Bulman 
• @maybulman 

Kim Jong-un’s brother had begged the North Korean leader to spare his life before he was “assassinated” in Malaysia, intelligence officials have revealed as police arrested a second suspect in connection with the death.

Kim Jong-nam, 45, wrote a letter to his brother in 2012, who took power after their father Kim Jong-il died in 2011, pleading with him to withdraw a standing order for his assassination, according to lawmakers who were briefed by South Korea’s spy agency. 

It comes following the arrest of a second woman suspected of spraying a poisonous liquid into the face of Mr Kim in Kuala Lumpur international airport on Monday as he prepared to board a flight to Macau, where he was living in exile. Mr Kim died shortly afterwards.

Police violence and discrimination in France's suburbs

OBSERVERS


As France struggles to come to terms with a high-profile case in which a French police officer is accused of using a baton to anally rape a young black man, our team spoke to residents of working class and immigrant neighbourhoods across the country about their relationship with the police. 
Protests continue across France ten days after a young black man was allegedly injured while in police custody in the Parisian suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois. Théo, who was hospitalised after the incident, had a ten-centimetre anal fissure reportedly caused by a policeman’s baton. 

Last Saturday, 2,000 people protested outside a courthouse in the Parisian suburb of Bobigny to demand justice for the 22-year-old victim. Despite calls for calm from Théo and his family, dozens of people have been arrested during several consecutive nights of clashes with police. Police reported that 37 people were arrested in Bobigny. 

No democratic dividend for Myanmar’s frontier markets

Myanmar's transition from military to democratic rule was supposed to spark an FDI bonanza. Capital commitments to date have been a trickle not a flood

By PETER JANSSEN

Myanmar’s elected government under de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi is fast approaching its first anniversary in office on April 1, providing an opportunity to assess its overall economic performance. On the foreign direct investment front, the results have so far been mixed.

New FDI approvals recorded by the Myanmar Investment Commission reached US$3.5 billion for the period spanning April-December 2016, down 28% from the corresponding period a year earlier, which was under the previous quasi-civilian government led by Thein Sein. The commission says overall approvals for the full financial year could reach US$7 billion, which would still be down from the US$9.5 billion received the previous year.

Catholic Church paid A$276m to abuse victims in Australia

The Australian Catholic Church has paid A$276m (£171m; $213m) to victims of sexual abuse since 1980, an inquiry has heard.

The money was divided between thousands of victims, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse was told.

The data, released on Thursday, showed the average payment was A$91,000.

The landmark royal commission was set up in 2013 and is also investigating abuse at non-religious organisations.

The Catholic Church made the payments in response to 3,066 of 4,445 child sexual abuse claims between 1980 and 2015, the inquiry heard. More than 40% of claims were received by a handful of male orders.